Reflection 232: Zero IQ

February 16, 2012

My brain doesn’t know the capital of Maine is Augusta or that 7×8=56. My brain doesn’t know it’s a brain, or anything at all about the English language. My brain knows zip, niente, nichts, nothing.

Why is that? Because if it knew anything it would have to have a knower module analogous to the screening room where perception is alleged to occur.

No, understanding and perception are kinetic events, not vaults where data is stored. Making experience and consciousness kinetic events, which can be stored in a distributive fashion in neural networks made up of pathways and synapses, true, but the experience and consciousness have to be recreated each time they appear by the neurochemical signals that animate them. Consciousness exists solely in the patterns and relations of such signals within the particular contexts and situations in which they arise.

This is the view I have come to after wrestling with this blog on consciousness, writing CONSCIOUSNESS: The BOOK, and realizing my efforts have taken me to a new place. The book, by the way, has appeared in nine versions under three titles (Know Thyself, At My Peril, and now C the B.) As I wrote yesterday, memory is the key to consciousness, as it is to knowledge and understanding. As is language, as is our number line, as is our calibration by the culture we grow up in. We are a team effort, each unique one of us, and exist in the electrochemical processes we host in our heads within the contexts around us and the energies impinging on our sensory apparatus.

Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Which is why orderly minds will never understand it. The only answer is to give yourself to your own consciousness and see what it tells you. If you look for it a certain way, it will be lost in the mists as soon as you set out. You have to let it come to you. You can’t get there from where you are.

No, I’m not on drugs. Or if I am, consciousness is my only drug. This is written by my consciousness, not by any physical me.

Stay tuned to this blog for further bulletins. Better yet, tune in to your own mind and see what it tells you. As ever, –Steve